Quotes About Perception

The allegation that English girls had no conversation must be true; but theirs was a SPEAKING silence. Their eyes and smiles were eloquent! She hoped it would teach their own girls that they need not chatter like magpies.

She knew that Virginia's survey of the world was limited to people, the clothes they wore, and the carriages they drove in. Her own universe was so crammed to bursting with wonderful sights and sounds that, in spite of her sense of Virginia's superiority - her beauty, her ease, her confidence - Nan sometimes felt a shamefaced pity for her.

It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes

it became clear to her observers that she was not quick at shifting her facial scenery. It was as though her countenance had so long been set in an expression of unchallenged superiority that the muscles had stiffened, and refused to obey her orders.

when ''such things happened'' it was undoubtedly foolish of the man, but somehow always criminal of the woman.

Is New York such a labyrinth? I thought it so straight up and down—like Fifth Avenue. And with all the cross streets numbered!" She seemed to guess his faint disapproval of this, and added, with the rare smile that enchanted her whole face: "If you knew how I like it for just that—the straight-up-and-downness, and the big honest labels on everything!" He saw his chance. "Everything may be labelled—but everybody is not.

Her incapacity to recognize change made her children conceal their views from her as Archer concealed his; there had been, from the first, a joint pretense of sameness, a kind of innocent family hypocrisy, in which father and children had unconsciously collaborated. And she died thinking the world a good place, full of loving and harmonious households like her own.

At least, she continued, it was you who made me understand that under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate that even those I most cared for in my other life look cheap in comparison. I don't know how to explain myself -- she drew together her troubled brows -- but it seems as if I'd never before understood with how much that is hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures may be paid for.

he was the kind of man who brings a sour mouth to the eating of the sweetest apple.

The whole truth?" Miss Bart laughed. "What is truth?

Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths.

and I know how names can alter the colour of beliefs.

Her entrances were always triumphs; but they had no sequel. As soon as people began to talk they ceased to see her.

What do you call the weak point? He paused. The fact that the average American looks down on his wife.

It seems so to me, said his wife, as if she were producing a new thought.

the things that she took for granted gave the measure of those she had rebelled against.

He felt himself flung back on all the ugly uncertainties from which he thought he had cast loose forever. After all, what did he know of her life? Only as much as she had chosen to show him, and measured by the world's estimate, how little that was!

More than half a lifetime divided them, and she had spent the long interval among people he did not know, in a society he but faintly guessed at, in conditions he would never wholly understand.

He was not blind to her crudity and her limitations, but they were a part of her grace and her persuasion. Diverse et ondoyante—so he had seen her from the first.

The one woman knew but did not understand; the other, it seemed, understood without knowing.

If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like; they don't make success, but they are a part of it. Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop—and if we can't keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership.

if the woman, however injured, however irreproachable, has appearances in the least degree against her, has exposed herself by any unconventional action to—to offensive insinuations—'' She

The drawing-room door opened, and two high-stocked and ample-coated young men came in—two Jim Ralstons, so to speak. Delia had never before noticed how much her husband and his cousin Joe were alike: it made her feel how justified she was in always thinking of the Ralstons collectively.

When she said to him once It looks as if it was painted! it seemed to Ethan that the art of definition could go no farther, and that words had at last been found to utter his secret souls.